Vegan Chocolate Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Icing

I recently did a new shoot with the fabulous Travis McKeithan called “Cupcake Baby.” I wore a fantastic cupcake dress from Domino Dollhouse and a handmade icing headband from Etsy. It was a ridiculously fun shoot with a little bit of sass and a whole lot of cute and I thought, “Hey, why not take this opportunity to share my favorite cupcake recipe?”

Cream together butter and cream cheese until just combined. Use a handheld mixer to whip while adding the powdered sugar in half cup batches. Mix until smooth and creamy, then mix in the vanilla. Keep tightly covered and refrigerated until ready to use. (Note: do not use a food processor, blender, or over-mix, as your icing will come out runny rather than fluffy).

And voilà! Vegan cupcakes with delicious cream cheese icing! If you’re feeling lazy you can substitute Duncan Hines classic white or vanilla from the store.

The Duncan Hines frosting is probably vegan. A lot of processed food items on the shelf use hydrogenated or partially-hydrogenated vegetable fats instead of animal milk butter, which is typically the base of a frosting recipe. For example plain old Oreos are technically vegan. Standard frosting wouldn’t have any animal products other than butter as a base and sometimes milk (although unlikely in packaged icing) as a thinning/wetting agent, which can of course also be replaced.

Now for a vegan purist, sometimes it would depend on the type of sugar used. Plain white sugar is often whitened using a product called bone char, which is what it sounds like, burnt up bone dust. Some vegans will not consume standard white sugar for this reason, so this then limits their selection of processed foods, which will just about always use the standard ingredient.

This is almost like my grandma’s brownie cupcake recipe… she only adds in 2 eggs and chopped chocolate and nuts for the batter and substitutes non-vegan ingredients for the icing. I’ll definitely have to try the vegan variety now, because the one I know is to die for!

I’ll be honest, I really hate any cupcake that I don’t make myself. There are some trendy cupcake places around here, expensive as well, and to me the cupcakes taste awful. Sweet, sweet, sweet with no dimension to the flavor. So the next time I’m feeling cake-y, I will give this recipe a try, it like it’ll be chocolate-y and decadent.